That it took a “moderate” Democrat senator (Manchin) from the second most deeply Republican state (West Virginia) three and a half months into the new Congress to wake up and embrace the filibuster so the Democrats can’t turn the USA into a one-party dictatorship, speaks a lot to the state of today’s Republican party, which ultimately is the Republican National Committee (RNC), its hired staff, and its state and local affiliates. The GOP came “this” close to extinction as a national party—and in fact, it’s not over, as Manchin is a weasel down to his bone marrow.
Understandably, Republicans (those elected with “Republican” next to their names) in Congress were in disarray after the January 6th riot. However, the RNC should have had a permanent “war room” or “activist central” ready to jump in and work on the Democrats’ soft underbelly (West Virginia public opinion) so as to sink H.R.1 and H.R.51 at a minimum, seeing as the Democrats had these bills in the pipeline for years, and had re-announced them in early January, no surprises.
That Manchin was able to sit on the fence and hem and haw on the filibuster for an astounding three and a half months—in fact, it took him almost four months to reject DC statehood—implies that no such organized, ground-pounding operation exists. It seems the RNC takes my $20/month and spends it on ads, data, and consultants, but not hard-nosed activists, protest organizers, PR campaign coordinators, op-ed ghostwriters, local talent scouts, astroturf engineers, and political mud wrestlers who can build targeted, overwhelming pressure and actually get things done (like Democrats do.)
It’s no longer enough to roll out some ad campaigns once every two years—U.S. politics has become a 24/7 war.
While Democrats are hungry and mad enough to eat your head off, today’s RNC is aloof, clueless, behind the times, and lacking in urgency, direction, vision, or any original ideas. With Trump gone, the national party is back to having no specific, core agenda whatsoever. Like the Democrats under Trump, we’re just waiting for Biden-Harris to slip up and give us something to work with. Sorry, that’s not good enough! The Democrats aren’t playing for keeps anymore—they are playing for extinction, a one-party government. In this vacuum, the RNC must step up. The RNC must do much better.
Unlike the Democrats’ infotainment behemoth, the GOP’s small corner of the media—especially with the unreliability of Fox News and the total self-destruction of the Wall Street Journal—is simply not up to the task of coordinated political activism; therefore,
we must have the RNC available as a resource to step in and (among other things) help state parties deal with state-level emergencies,
such as the Manchin situation. We need that quick reaction force or relief column to be available at all times, anywhere in the country.
Further, we must be 100 percent on the offensive, 100 percent of the time, like the Democrats and their media. We the voting base are tired of seeing our “leaders” and representatives always on the back foot.
We need “opposition research” not just before elections, but ALL THE TIME
—we need a team of private investigators going around the country looking at wacko school board members and other Democrat clowns all up the political chain. We need the RNC to do it, because state parties in Virginia or Missouri seldom have access to that level of expertise (even if they had the money.) Just as states once needed G-Men to fight the mafia and the Klan, this must be a national project.
Furthermore, we need a coherent agenda with coordinated messaging,
not a mess of random odds and ends that amount to nothing. With Trump out of the picture, we need a core of ideologists (not ideologues) to give us some practical agenda to rally around, not reactive mush arising from politicos in DC putting a moist finger to the wind on any given day. Because those are the people who—inadvertently—gave us Trump. Most of them are still there. They won’t pursue any new ideas about better trade deals, moving government jobs out of DC to help depressed parts of the country, or anything else that rocks any boat.
In Trump’s absence, we need the RNC to set the agenda.
Do you think Kevin “deer in the headlights” McCarthy will give us a “Contract with America” for 2022? Of course not. You could put the TV on mute and show a video of McCarthy to a Siberian Eskimo, and the reaction (in the native language) would be, “not gonna follow this guy out onto the ice.” May be a nice guy, not a leader, not an ideas guy, not much of anything.
The 2022 “Contract” can only come from a central party structure that listens to the base (and to swing voters) and then forces its will on all Federal elected officials who have been graciously allowed to borrow the name “Republican.” And if they defy, then deny them use of WinRed, deny them any platform, deny them any data, systems, event invitations, or any comfort at all. Change the bylaws to that effect, if needed.
If we’re in no danger of losing the seat (I’m not talking about Susan Collins), then disown them utterly, publicly. Censure them at the RNC level. In Europe and elsewhere, they call it “party discipline.” It’s a normal thing.
The time to institute these changes is now; a year from now it will be too late; we can’t be in turmoil during an election year.
Frankly, we need a new RNC. We don’t need seat-warmers who are just so aww-shux’ed to be there. We need every soul to be potentially that sergeant who, seeing all the officers are dead, and with the enemy closing in, takes it upon himself to shout “CompaNYYYYY! On my co-MMAAAND: Fiiiiiiix……. BAYONETS!!!!” and leads a howling mad, frightfully thin line of cold, sharp steel over the sandbags. (This is a metaphor, don’t put me on a list.)
Anything less, get the hell off the Committee, resign now and let your state send up someone else. “Being MAGA” but doing nothing is not good enough.
You are not there to sit back and watch Liz Cheney dump all over the state and local chairs who trusted you and put you on that Committee. You are there to defend the Honor and Integrity of this noble Brand, which freed the slaves, the greatest party in history—if you can’t do that, go back full-time to your solid careers in advertising, law, or real estate.
Change won’t be easy, but as with alcoholism, the first step is recognizing the problem. There are several thousand county GOP officers and other state and local party officials, staff, and activists on this mailing list. Do you folks think you are being well served?
With Trump more or less gone, do you see any vision or direction coming from the top? Do you think they could have organized more pressure on Manchin? Do you trust Kevin McCarthy to lead us to victory next year? Do you think the RNC should step in to assert its “brand name” when rogue politicians dump all over the Republican voting base and its beliefs and priorities?
Or, do you think the RNC should limit itself to sharing data with its affiliates, raising money and coming out with a few big ad campaigns once every two years (and a “platform” that no one reads every four), letting the politicians figure out the rest?
UPDATE : May 27, 2021
THE RNC RESPONDS TO Dreizin Report
I have received responses from several Republican National Committee (RNC) members to my posts criticizing the RNC for inertia, complacency, lack of creativity, and lack of interest or capacity to resolve the party’s leadership and ideological vacuum. The responses shine a sad light on the state of the party today.
One RNC committee-person (no hints) from a significant “red” state, responded to my below piece, saying I don’t have a clue. I said OK, prove me wrong, kindly let me know what the RNC has done lately, as far as the points I raised (see below)—and I will send your response, verbatim, to my nationwide mailing list.
He/she accepted and then forwarded me, over the course of a week, 11 (eleven) RNC daily talking points emails, for example, the kind that go out to talk radio hosts, giving them ideas on what to say. After that week had passed, I said, this is a bunch of smoke, what are you actually doing? He/she got huffy and said (more or less) it’s secret, not sharing with you, don’t want to talk to you anymore, go away. This is a top, top professional in his/her state. Warming a seat on the RNC. Doesn’t know the difference between daily smoke on the one hand, and strategy, direction, activism, and results, on the other.
Another RNC committee-person (much nicer) read my post, “GOP drops ball on Israel, Jew-hating”, and sent it to Ronna McDaniel for a response. Ronna farmed it out to her staff to get back to the committee-person, who forwarded the response to me. It was along the lines of, “Our defense of Israel was quoted in the Washington Post etc., we ran an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, we did X number of interviews, Y number of videos, Z number of social media posts, etc.” It was literally in a table format. Reporting by the numbers, a quota game, with no concern for real impact. As if the raw numbers are an achievement. It sounds like a Government bureaucracy.
What are they doing to turn the dial, change the discourse? To win? After I sent out “GOP drops ball on Israel, Jew-hating”, the hate got much, much worse. Jews were attacked or threatened in many cities, and a Jewish man was jumped and savagely beaten, pepper-sprayed, and nearly killed by a mob in broad daylight on Times Square. Why has Ronna or any Republican in Congress not taken the obvious, no-downside step of going on Fox or even Democrat TV to call for a Federal hate crimes investigation on every recent attack on Jewish persons in NY, L.A., etc.? The same way that the FBI sent FIFTEEN agents to look at the NASCAR noose hoax, last year?
No, that’s too far of a stretch. Perhaps they see it as racial hustling, something Republicans don’t do. Can’t be too aggressive in pursuing the Jewish vote! Can’t call out Democrats for treating violence/hate against different groups differently (because Jews are “white” and thus, less holy in the woke hierarchy.) Instead, let’s sit on it, wait a few days, and allow Democrats to flip the script, making it all about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s dumb tweet about the Holocaust.
Look, we don’t need functionaries and bureaucrats at the RNC. We need vision and ideas people—people who can see an opportunity, seize it, and roll out a large-scale ambush on the Democrats within six hours, even on a Sunday. Not waiting five days on Senator Hawley (great as he is) and a few colleagues to introduce a three-page, Jewish defense resolution in the Senate, when the Democrats have already changed the subject, and will never allow a vote on this thing, anyway.
We need a seven-days-per-week “war room” to hit back at the enemy and its Fake News machine in creative and unpredictable ways. We need people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, to airdrop into the hot spots, go out into the streets. If Trump were still president, Chuck Schumer et al. would be marching against antisemitism, it would be on all the networks. They would make it Trump’s fault, even though it’s Democrat voters who are behind the violence. Where are the Republicans? We can’t afford to have an RNC focused exclusively on raising money from big donors for silly ads and uninspired talking points.
Anyone in the state and county party structures who may have doubted it’s as bad as I’ve been saying, well, you see now, it’s that bad. Legally, on paper, as an organization, we have a Republican party at the national level. In practice, no, we don’t. There’s an office but there’s no real party. We might win in 2022 because of the economy, but the way things are going now, it won’t be a “deserved” victory, it will be pure chance.
Incidentally, if anyone thinks “all this Dreizin guy ever does is whine”, I am looking at putting together a detailed open letter, for national circulation, in support of Jews and Judaism and a steel-hammer Federal response to anti-Jewish violence and incitement, to be signed by as many state and county GOP officials as possible. This approach has never been tried before, and would show that the party grassroots are capable of leading on policy and inter-community relations, where the leadership has failed. If you are a state/district or county/city party officer (holding a named position under the bylaws), or an officer of any legally chartered, GOP-aligned activist group (e.g. a Republican women’s organization), and you might have an interest in signing on (you’ll be able to see it before you sign), please respond to let me know.
UPDATE : June 1, 2021
Your name can change the country
Following up on the final paragraph in my last update, “RNC responds to Dreizin Report”, this is an effort to get the GOP grassroots directly involved in a major statement of policy as well as a rare, strong, heartfelt, direct outreach effort to Jewish Americans. We are going to show the RNC how it’s actually done. Please, read the “open letter” at the bottom of this message, and then:
(1) If you are an official with any state, district, county, or city Republican party structure, or with any chartered/incorporated Republican-oriented group (Tea Party, Republican women, etc., to include local chapter heads of statewide groups), please consider communicating to me your intent to sign on to this letter, also recruiting your fellow officers and others you may know within your respective state.
Your signature, in this context, is a political asset of potentially great consequence.
You have a legal guarantee from me that this (below) is the intended draft of the letter, and that the text of the letter will not be changed, not even minimally, without informing you and giving you a chance to withdraw your signature before the letter is sent. I want everyone to be comfortable and to understand that this is an honest, professional-grade effort. As for how to provide your signature (along with org/title), we will deal with the technical details later.
(2) If you are a Congressional or state legislative office chief of staff, an RNC member or employee, a campaign donor, media figure, precinct captain or other volunteer, or anyone else on this mailing list who might be willing to help (everybody counts), please forward this complete email to your state or county GOP officials, and ask them to get back to me to sign on. I don’t necessarily need or want to know who sent them; I won’t be asking questions.
Yes, this letter is deep, packed with details, and it sounds like a “pro” wrote it, but that’s no problem. When a Washington, DC lobby group writes a letter to (for example) the Department of Energy, and uses U.S. Senators as stand-ins to sign that letter, as if it’s coming from them, the letter still works. The addressee (e.g. Secretary of Energy) understands that the Senators didn’t write it, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re on record now, and it’s a statement, a flag in the ground. It’s the same idea here, except here it is the GOP grassroots reaching out to Jewish Americans.
———————————————————————————————————
June XX, 2021
To: Jewish Federations; Jewish Community Relations Councils; Jewish denominational
umbrella organizations; other major U.S. Jewish organizations; synagogues and other
Jewish communal entities; Jewish-oriented media outlets
Dear Jewish Brothers and Sisters,
We, the signatories to this open letter, as officers and activists comprising a substantial part of the “grass roots” foundation of the Republican party and political conservative movement nationwide, declare as follows:
We were shocked at the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in May 2021, culminating in numerous acts of harassment and unprovoked violence in New York City, Los Angeles, and other cities on May 21-23. We were horrified to see video of a mob assault in or near Times Square, New York, in which (as more detail came out later) one solitary Jewish man wearing a kippah was accosted; viciously beaten with feet, fists, and implements; pepper-sprayed; and nearly killed by the mob. The year is 2021, and we saw pogroms in New York, among other places.
We were further shocked to read that of the two suspects arrested (so far, as of this writing) in the above-mentioned attack, at least one was quickly released from jail, after posting a laughable $10,000 bond, having reportedly told a prison worker that he “would do it again”, and having been met by a group of supporters upon his release, who—in a provocative gesture, suggesting that American justice is a game to be played, or does not apply to them—hoisted him onto shoulders like a hero, just in front of the holding facility.
We note that although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has claimed to be looking into a small number (reportedly, as few as two) of the May incidents, as of this writing in early June, neither of the two known suspects in the Times Square assault has faced any Federal hate crime charge. Notwithstanding some conference calls with Jewish community representatives, there seems to have been a “public relations” initiative by the FBI and the New York Police Department to play down any conception of the May attacks as a qualitatively separate phenomenon, distinct from hate crime on aggregate. Moreover, we have seen a “coordinated talking points” effort by some politicians to condemn a straw-man “Islamophobia” in the same breath as hate and violence towards Jews—although there has been no recent wave of attacks on Muslims in this country. We are very troubled by this spin and misdirection.
We consider the May attacks to have been a distinct phenomenon, which must be publicly held as such. One-off, solitary assaults with bigoted motivations are bad enough, but what our nation saw in May was a spasm of shameless, “in broad daylight, out in the street” violence directed by members of one ethno-sectarian group against another. In almost all cases, the attackers or harassers were marauding in groups. These were not merely hate crimes, but pogroms. The U.S. has not seen such behavior, so widespread, in decades. Even the disturbances of 2020—while wreaking great economic destruction—were not of a strictly “group on group” nature.
We firmly believe that—as regards the internal life of the United States—foreign conflicts must remain foreign. If states or localities are unable to guarantee this, the Federal Government must step forward. The U.S. Department of Justice should have been mobilized, in a highly public and ambitious manner, to investigate and pursue Federal hate crime charges against the alleged perpetrators of all the May attacks, which are almost all on video. We note that the Federal Government has moved much more firmly on similar matters of probably lesser import, such as last year’s NASCAR noose quasi-hoax.
We totally reject any prioritization of victim categories, such that victims of Jewish faith or descent are not held up by the news media and not as aggressively defended by the guardians of the law, to include the Federal Government. Although there are considerable socioeconomic disparities across various demographic groups within the United States, all must enjoy equal protection under the law.
We feel that a rare opportunity to harshly, comprehensively, demonstratively liquidate the potential for ethno-sectarian violence in the United States was missed in May 2021. Thus, we fear that our nation will face this problem again within an unfortunately short time. To borrow an expression from President Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, ethno-sectarian violence is “a problem from hell.” When not crushed utterly, it always comes back, on a larger scale and in more odious form. Not aggressively pursuing Federal hate crime charges—with “guns drawn” raids, and all the other trappings, similar to measures taken against the “January 6” Capitol Hill rioters—against all alleged perpetrators of the May 2021 pogroms was a mistake.
More broadly, we affirm our admiration and respect for the Jewish religion and people, which have enormously enriched the culture, science, and economic development of the United States. For as long as there is an America, we pledge that there will be Jews living and thriving in America. We also affirm our unshakeable support for the existence of the State of Israel, which is in the national security as well as the moral interests of the United States. Support for Israel must under no circumstances fall subject to domestic partisan bickering.
In this context, we express our sympathy and understanding at the intimidation or harassment that many Jewish university faculty members and professionals have recently experienced due to their real or perceived support for Israel, or lack of enthusiasm for anti-Israel sentiment, expressions, or activity in the workplace or on campus. Sadly, political intimidation in the workplace is not a new phenomenon. We would gladly join you in supporting state and Federal legislation aimed at establishing political affiliation and belief as a protected category (with some reasonable limitations) in terms of employment law.
Again, we extend our respect and admiration, and we thank you for your attention at this sensitive time.
(Names and positions/titles of signatories to this letter are identified on the pages which follow.)
